good kid, maad city - a small-town kid&#x27;s A-level journey

OP

9709_w15_qp_31.pdf100.9KB

I woke up at 10 am today to go to a 4 hour chemistry class - absolutely agonising. My teacher decided to cover all the organic material across all modules and I felt like it was decently productive for the most part.

Here's a fraction of what we did:

Not too bad a morning, especially because I had fried chicken. :biggrin:

FP2 June 2013 (R):
Time taken: 1 hour 5 mins
Raw marks: 70/75
UMS: 92

Pretty disappointed with my performance here, seeing as I basically got the idea in the last question but messed it up due to stupidity.

Q1 - complex transformation algebra. Approached it quite nicely, tbf - noticed that I needed to Im 0 immediately and it'd fall out. 3:34
Q2 - inequalities are some of my favourite FP2 questions, idk why. Needed to carefully note that the coefficient of

x^{4}

was negative to find my inequalities (plotted the graph on my graphical just in case :colondollar:

). 6:18
Q3 - liking this new "cover-up method" I've picked up for partial fractions. Easier than algebra and comparing coefficients and very quick. Nice telescoping and checked the answer on my calculator. 9:00
Q4 - yuck, Taylor series... 5:37
Q5 - not bad, but left the final answer in an inappropriate from so -1. 6:37
Q6 - felt like it was straight out of the textbook examples. Took some care with the trig solutions and kept checking. 8:18
Q7 - yucky tedious differentiation. 9:25
Q8 - damn, I was so close to nipping this one in the bud until I got to

\sin \theta \sin 2 \theta = \cos \theta \cos 2 \theta

- took an inappropriate solution and botched the whole thing afterwards. -4

A very clean method was shown to me (cheers, Zacken!) afterwards and I decided to redo the question neatly for future reference.

Spoiler

ye, final answer should be

9\left ( \sqrt{2}-1 \right )

, soz Zacken

Then we had a power surge for about 2-3 hours. :moon:

We had no WiFi so I decided to do a CIE paper I had downloaded for fun.

CIE Oct-Nov 2015 P3 v1
Marks attained: 72/75

No proper discussion as this wasn't on my spec, but I really liked a few of these questions (a little more "think-y" than UK specs). Questions 3 and 5 (last part) were nice and I liked 7 as well. I've attached the paper in case anyone wants to take a look. :smile:

I think I've done a decent amount today, but I think I'll do some Physics as well - possibly a U4 or U6 paper.

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 902

OP

Original post by Imperion

Noice update :biggrin:

Original post by SaadKaleem

Impressive marks! Keep it up :smile:

Thanks lads. :biggrin:

I hope I can bag M3. :redface:

Original post by Imperion

I remember doing Q1 thinking "I expect a straight jab but instead got a hook" lol

Yeah, I told a friend of mine to do the paper and he said the first question threw him off 'cause he didn't try kinematics in ages. :lol:

Pretty evil. :colone:

Reply 903

Duke Glacia

16

Original post by Ayman!

I woke up at 10 am today to go to a 4 hour chemistry class - absolutely agonising. My teacher decided to cover all the organic material across all modules and I felt like it was decently productive for the most part.

Here's a fraction of what we did:

Not too bad a morning, especially because I had fried chicken. :biggrin:

FP2 June 2013 (R):
Time taken: 1 hour 5 mins
Raw marks: 70/75
UMS: 92

Pretty disappointed with my performance here, seeing as I basically got the idea in the last question but messed it up due to stupidity.

Q1 - complex transformation algebra. Approached it quite nicely, tbf - noticed that I needed to Im 0 immediately and it'd fall out. 3:34
Q2 - inequalities are some of my favourite FP2 questions, idk why. Needed to carefully note that the coefficient of

x^{4}

was negative to find my inequalities (plotted the graph on my graphical just in case :colondollar:

). 6:18
Q3 - liking this new "cover-up method" I've picked up for partial fractions. Easier than algebra and comparing coefficients and very quick. Nice telescoping and checked the answer on my calculator. 9:00
Q4 - yuck, Taylor series... 5:37
Q5 - not bad, but left the final answer in an inappropriate from so -1. 6:37
Q6 - felt like it was straight out of the textbook examples. Took some care with the trig solutions and kept checking. 8:18
Q7 - yucky tedious differentiation. 9:25
Q8 - damn, I was so close to nipping this one in the bud until I got to

\sin \theta \sin 2 \theta = \cos \theta \cos 2 \theta

- took an inappropriate solution and botched the whole thing afterwards. -4

A very clean method was shown to me (cheers, Zacken!) afterwards and I decided to redo the question neatly for future reference.

Spoiler

Then we had a power surge for about 2-3 hours. :moon:

We had no WiFi so I decided to do a CIE paper I had downloaded for fun.

CIE Oct-Nov 2015 P3 v1
Marks attained: 72/75

No proper discussion as this wasn't on my spec, but I really liked a few of these questions (a little more "think-y" than UK specs). Questions 3 and 5 (last part) were nice and I liked 7 as well. I've attached the paper in case anyone wants to take a look. :smile:

I think I've done a decent amount today, but I think I'll do some Physics as well - possibly a U4 or U6 paper.

Spoiler

Reply 904

PlayerBB

Original post by Ayman!

I woke up at 10 am today to go to a 4 hour chemistry class - absolutely agonising. My teacher decided to cover all the organic material across all modules and I felt like it was decently productive for the most part.

Here's a fraction of what we did:

Liked the questions, pretty refreshing!! And 4 hours of chemistry, not too bad haha :tongue:

. Well done on the previous marks you have posted :h:

Reply 905

OP

Results from my last set of mocks!! :eek:

Spoiler

Overall, I'm satisfied. C34 was annoying af because the paper was horribly printed and a question said

y = -f\left ( x \right )

when the minus sign was supposedly not there. FP2 was pretty nice apart from one nasty complex number question whereas FP3 was a complete mind****, haha. Proud of my stats this time, though! I'm really happy with my improvement in physics and chemistry, especially because the former was working me.

Still a long way to go! :yes:

By the way, I'd really appreciate it if someone could help translate some of those papers to UMS. I've found out that FP2 was UK June 2014, UK FP3 June 2014, M3 January 2010 (lol), Physics 5 IAL January 2016, Physics 6 IAL June 2015, Chem 5 January 2012.

Revision:

I've resorted to doing CIE questions for the really nitty-gritty parts of physics - namely capacitors, EM fields and electromagnetism. Aiming to finish off the questions in this book I bought. After doing so, I'll do a couple more U4 past papers.

Before doing so, I've done U4 June 2012 and scored 64/80 (2 raw below full UMS). Unfortunately, I did not have a physical copy of the paper so I couldn't attempt the scale diagram and scored 0 on those. :lol:

Question 17 and 18 on this paper were absolutely beautiful, though! 17 was a blend of classical mechanics, EM fields and a dash of quantum with nice mechanics - 18 was similar. :biggrin:

Disappointed at my recent M3 attempts, though. More on that to follow below -

M3 IAL June 2014:
Marks attained: 66/75
UMS: 87

Really weirded out that I ****ed this paper up, especially because it was so straightforward. Q2 was nice, but apparently I'm too dumb to do something as simple as Q4 which is where I lost most of my marks. Q5(c) was riddled with silly mistakes as well. On a lighter note, 7(c) made me go "what's this doing on an M3 paper?" :lol:

M3 IAL January 2015:
Marks attained: 71/75
UMS: 95
Time taken: 1 hour 10 mins

Did this paper tonight, and I'm sort of happy with it although one thing is getting me worried - did I take a substantially long time? Perhaps Zain can help? I've incorporated checking while doing a question so I don't have to go over the paper once again when I'm done.

Q1 - kinematics - wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. Tried to see if it factorised to something nicer but left it as an ugly quadratic in the end. 4:20 (blaze it - not kidding, once again)
Q2 - gotta be careful with these ones 'cause they say "algebraic" integration, so it implies that you need to show all your working. 6:26
Q3 - Surprisingly straightforward. Didn't need to sub in any trig values because

\tan 30 \degree

cancelled out nicely. 5:26
Q4 - These take me a while to do as I tend to try and be as careful as possible - mucking up energy changes can be quite easy to do. 8:50
Q5 - lovely, probably my favourite question on the paper. Part (b) was apparently horribly done according to the examiner's reports, but I'd really love to see the vector method they're talking about in the mark scheme. 13:18
Q6 - standard circular motion question, although this is where I lost the 4 marks. The

mg \cos \theta

in my first line of work suddenly turned into

\frac{mg}{2}

.

Tried making the diagrams as neat as possible and spent quite a bit of time being as careful as I could, but to no avail. I chose the SUVAT way for part (c) even though I thought of using energy - not a good move as it was lengthier. 19:16 (much too long.)
Q7 - SHM! Very nice. 12:28

That's all for tonight. :biggrin:

Looking to make tomorrow productive. :yep:

Reply 906

SaadKaleem

8

Original post by Ayman!

Results from my last set of mocks!! :eek:

Spoiler

By the way, I'd really appreciate it if someone could help translate some of those papers to UMS. I've found out that FP2 was UK June 2014, UK FP3 June 2014, M3 January 2010 (lol), Physics 5 IAL January 2016, Physics 6 IAL June 2015, Chem 5 January 2012.

FP2: 92/100 [A* at 70/75, Full at 75/75]
FP3: 99/100 [Full at 69/75]

Physics 5 IAL: 110/120 [Full at 72/80]
Physics 6 IAL: 60/60 [Full at 35/40]

Chem 5: 111/120 [Full at 88/90]

M3 isn't on converter but it's definitely a 100/100.

Keep up the excellent marks :smile:

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 907

Zacken

22

Looks good all around - your lengthy blog posts make you seem so productive; maybe I can pull that off on mine too. :tongue:

Re: M3; Looks like it was a bit of an odd paper in the sense that one question took you twenty minutes - I'd say a good time is an hour to an hour 10 minutes max for M3 so it looks like you're on the 'safe' boundary; those extra twenty minutes left would be to go through your paper and fix silly things like cos theta = 1/2. So all in all, not much to improve.

Well done on your mocks, as well! Those stats scores are brilliant!

Reply 908

Big up man!! :biggrin:

Reply 909

...why is this thread titled a kendrick lamar album?

Reply 910

Original post by BubbleBoobies

...why is this thread titled a kendrick lamar album?

Why's your username BubbleBoobies?

Reply 911

Original post by Imperion

Why's your username BubbleBoobies?

usernames describe the person
thread titles describe the thread
my username describes me, this thread's title doesn't describe the thread

sooo why is this thread called a kendrick lamar album?
why wasn't this thread called "to pimp a butterfly" instead?
heck, why not simply "the chronic", "enter the wu tang" or "only built for cuban lynx"?
not to be disrespecting KL but surely those albums are better?

Reply 912

Original post by BubbleBoobies

usernames describe the person
thread titles describe the thread
my username describes me, this thread's title doesn't describe the thread

sooo why is this thread called a kendrick lamar album?
why wasn't this thread called "to pimp a butterfly" instead?
heck, why not simply "the chronic", "enter the wu tang" or "only built for cuban lynx"?
not to be disrespecting KL but surely those albums are better?

You're overthinking this :laugh:

Reply 913

Original post by Imperion

You're overthinking this :laugh:

well anyway: how are your a levels actually going?

Reply 914

Original post by BubbleBoobies

well anyway: how are your a levels actually going?

Not bad, not bad. Got my first in a couple of days :laugh:

Spoiler

Reply 915

Original post by Imperion

Not bad, not bad. Got my first in a couple of days :laugh:

Spoiler

ohh, I thought that was the reason you replied to my original message :lol:

well either way good luck - a levels are harder than uni imo - I had to revise for like a month to get A*AA(C) (that last C should have been at least a B dammit, ****in' coursework moderators) and for uni I haven't been to hardly any of my lectures and I'm getting 2:1s and 1sts - I'm not even doing an easy course too - it's politics at a top 10 uni - a levels are hard stuff.

Reply 916

Original post by Ayman!

I woke up at 10 am today to go to a 4 hour chemistry class - absolutely agonising.

Reply 917

OP

Original post by SaadKaleem

FP2: 92/100 [A* at 70/75, Full at 75/75]
FP3: 99/100 [Full at 69/75]

Physics 5 IAL: 110/120 [Full at 72/80]
Physics 6 IAL: 60/60 [Full at 35/40]

Chem 5: 111/120 [Full at 88/90]

M3 isn't on converter but it's definitely a 100/100.

Keep up the excellent marks :smile:

Thanks a lot, Saad :h:

Damn, those Chem 5 and FP2 boundaries were strict :redface:

Original post by BubbleBoobies

...why is this thread titled a kendrick lamar album?

No particular reason. :tongue:

I was listening to the album while making this thread and said "why not".

Original post by BubbleBoobies

precisely my reaction.

Original post by Zacken

Looks good all around - your lengthy blog posts make you seem so productive; maybe I can pull that off on mine too. :tongue:

Re: M3; Looks like it was a bit of an odd paper in the sense that one question took you twenty minutes - I'd say a good time is an hour to an hour 10 minutes max for M3 so it looks like you're on the 'safe' boundary; those extra twenty minutes left would be to go through your paper and fix silly things like cos theta = 1/2. So all in all, not much to improve.

Well done on your mocks, as well! Those stats scores are brilliant!

I posted like 5 days of work at one go, though - so definitely not fair. :lol:

Ah, yeps - I'm worried if I actually manage to **** something up massively I won't have any time to recover. Idk why this question took me so long, maybe I focused too much on making my diagrams neat using a compass and stuff.

It's alright - the real exams are a little more difficult so gonna need to buckle down. :redface:

By the way, give FP2 and FP3 June 14 UK a go. I really wonder how you'll like the FP3 paper.

Reply 918

Original post by Ayman!

No particular reason. :tongue:

I was listening to the album while making this thread and said "why not".

well, it *is* an awesome album

Reply 919

OP